Topic

How to Test the New Houses

OK! Now you can test some parts of the new housing system. We're concentrating here on furniture and decoration (later releases will add the ability to craft new furniture, expand houses, cultivate land and use imagination to grow your yard and home street).

To try it out, get in the game type "/home" in local chat (it is deliberately hard to do right now so that people don't get confused and think this is *the* permanent switchover — this house is just for your testing and customizations will eventually be reset). When you're at home, there will be a new button which takes you back to the regular game world.

Once you go inside, you'll see the new furniture tab by your inventory and a "decorate" button at the top-right of the game. Go crazy. Upgrading furniture is all free right now (in the future, some upgrades will be subscriber-only and some will cost credits).

You can't get any more furniture for now and you also can't give, trade or sell furniture until the next release (or maybe the one after that). However, you can bring your stuff over to the new house and not worry about it getting lost when we reset (we'll keep it all safe) — it is just the furniture customizations that you'll lose.

To move furniture around and place items on furniture, you need to be in "decoration mode", which will hide your avatar and allow you to use the arrow keys to pan around your house.

You'll be switched to decoration mode automatically when you drag something out of your furniture bag, but you can also hit the "decorate" button in the top right of the game window.

To change wallpaper, ceilings and floors, hit the "swatches" button which appears in the top bar when you're in decoration mode. You can stamp the patterns on or drag them into place. For wallpapers you can either to a single segment or the whole wall at once.

Finally, though the land outside your house is fixed for now (you can't expand it or add/remove resources yet) you do have a customizable signpost outside: you can use that to add up to five signs pointing to the home streets of people from your friends list.

Note: If you don't see any furniture (or just your trophies) inside your furniture bag when you enter your house, type "/home" again.

Note 2: You can type "/home" from wherever you are in the world, including other people's houses.

Note 3: We will give plenty of notice before the real switchover to the new housing system and, if you own a regular in-world house at that time, all of the items inside it will be moved over automatically. You don't have to move everything yourself.

Replies

This is super cool! I'm having a few glitchy issues, though.
1. Many of my trophies are also duplicated, and musicblocks are missing, as mentioned above.
2. I try to pick up furniture and some go into my regular inventory and get stuck there ("place" option doesn't work). At the moment I have a ceiling lamp and a shelf where two of my bags should be. This persists back into already-existing bits of Ur. (Also, I think it's confusing the system - when I try to place other ceiling lamps, they just disappear.)3. The wall containing my front door is currently painted backwards, like so: http://i.imgur.com/3TH1W.png

I can send a bug report if that would help.
Edit: Reloading fixed the issues.

Only repeating this because you've been so good at answering everything so think you might have missed it: when walking on furniture, if several items are in front of each other I don't always appear to be walking on the one at the front.

I know that this is a test and all but I have a couple questions. I have a friend who downsized to a meadow house just so she could have a polar bear chair. There isn't (yet maybe?) a polar bear chair option in the new houses (although the Yeti bed is epic). Is it possible to keep our current furniture and upgrade to the new stuff? Where are the storage cabinets? Are the sample prices any indication of what things will cost?

I love it and my house is beautiful. Responses above have answered a lot of my questions but would like to know if we will ever be able to sit down on the chairs or bed. I wouldn't bother paying for it just to clutter up the room and be useless except as decoration.

Also, I, too, have something odd about the door when I am inside, it's sort of duplicated or shadowed in a strange way.

That's weird, my invisible Rook Nest Bed just turned up in my regular inventory... while I was donating to Humbaba... And now my Humbaba emblem has disappeared into the same item slot... going to reload.

Thank you so very much this is so cool i love this chance to preview our new houses.:) i really like that we can plant both herbs and veggies .... now if we could only sit on the furniture or did i miss something :) cant wait for the storage things yippie IM SO EXCITED to try all this great stuff thanks again :)

I just tried going to a friend's home street who hadn't edited their signpost to add any signs and there wasn't any way to get out except to go back to the world..... It would be nice if there was a way to go back to my house.... or would typing /home again have worked?

Wow. Wow wow and some more wow. This is pretty much all that I could have hoped for and then a whole lot more =)

Minor things: Trophies that I've put on the shelf and no longer want there - how do you remove them? Dragging them back to the inventory says 'Verb not enabled' - does that mean it will be in future?
Also, will we be able to select (or change) the default house style? Say if we wanted a forest-style house rather than meadow-style, we can reset that?